In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [16]
If there was no affectation, no deliberate effort to fabricate a special language, then this style of pronunciation was a regular museum of French history displayed in conversation. “My great-uncle Fitt-jam” was not at all surprising, for we know that the Fitz-James family are proud to boast that they are French nobles and do not like to hear their name pronounced in the English fashion. One must, however, marvel at the touching docility of the people who had previously supposed themselves obliged to pronounce certain names phonetically, and who, all of a sudden, after hearing the Duchesse de Guermantes pronounce them otherwise, adopted a pronunciation which they could never have guessed. Thus the Duchess, who had had a great-grandfather attending on the Comte de Chambord, liked to tease her husband for having turned Orleanist by proclaiming: “We old Frochedorf people …” The visitor, who had always imagined that he was correct in saying “Frohsdorf,” at once turned his coat, and ever afterwards might be heard saying “Frochedorf.”
On one occasion when I asked Mme de Guermantes who a young blood was whom she had introduced to me as her nephew but whose name I had failed to catch, I was none the wiser when from the back of her throat the Duchess uttered in a very loud but quite inarticulate voice: “C‘est l’ … i Eon, frère à Robert. He claims to have the same shape of skull as the ancient Welsh.” Then I realised that she had said: “C’est le petit Léon,” and that this was the Prince de Leon, who was indeed Robert de Saint-Loup’s brother-in-law. “I know nothing about his skull,” she went on, “but the way he dresses, and I must say he does dress very well, is not at all in the style of those parts. Once when I was staying at Josselin, with the Rohans, we all went over to a place of pilgrimage to which peasants had come from pretty well every part of Brittany. A great hulking villager from Leon stood gaping at Robert’s brother-in-law in his beige breeches. ‘What are you staring at me like that for?’ said Leon, ‘I bet you don’t know who I am.’ The peasant admitted as much. ‘Well,’ said Leon, ‘I’m your Prince.’ ‘Oh!’ said the peasant, taking off his cap and apologising. ‘I thought you were an Englische.’”
And if, seizing this point of departure, I led Mme de Guermantes on to talk about the Rohans (with whom her own family had frequently intermarried), her conversation would become impregnated with a hint of the melancholy charm of the Breton “pardons,” the calvary processions, and (as that true poet Pampille would say) with “the pungent flavour of buckwheat pancakes cooked over a gorse fire.”
Of the Marquis du Lau (whose sad end is familiar—when, himself deaf, he used to be taken to call on Mme H—who was blind), she would recall the less tragic years when, after the day’s sport, at Guermantes, he would change into slippers before having tea with the King of England, to whom he did not regard himself as inferior, and with whom, as we see, he did not stand on ceremony. She described all this so picturesquely that she seemed to invest him with the plumed musketeer hat of the somewhat vainglorious gentlemen of Périgord.
But even in the mere designation of people Mme de Guermantes,